Garcia's Heart (34 page)

In all the time he had known the Garcías, Patrick had tried, unsuccessfully, to get any of them to tell him what their life had been like before Le Dépanneur Mondial. No one spoke of Honduras, and other than Marta's reminiscences of Detroit, none of the Garcías had spoken about Hernan's work. And so Patrick was left to wonder why Hernan García left Tegucigalpa and his life as a doctor. He had gathered a rough understanding of the politics of the region, and he'd learned enough to know that it was just the sort of place that people were
forced to leave in the middle of the night. In that context, it wasn't difficult to imagine Hernan as a hero. A dedicated man forced to leave the job he loved for speaking out against an injustice or because he'd rubbed some generalissimo the wrong way. And so he had to leave, to protect his family, filing away a career, a vocation, as though it were just another job experience. That was why nobody spoke of it, he decided. His family understood the injustice.

In other ways, Patrick had become Hernan's confidant. As a medical student, he had reopened a world for Hernan, offering access to all that Hernan had lost. Patrick reintroduced medical textbooks to the García household, unwittingly restarted conversations that had gone silent years before. He and Hernan were now colleagues, and as someone partially indoctrinated into medical life, Patrick felt he could understand Hernan in a way that no one else could. That spring, Hernan began to tell Patrick about the people who had continued to come to Le Dépanneur Mondial looking for a medical opinion. These were snippets of conversation at first, offered with hesitation, as though testing Patrick to see how they would be received. It didn't take long for Hernan to realize that he had an eager audience. They were usually illegal immigrants, Salvadorans and Peruvians mostly, people who had heard that he could help and who would wait until the store was empty before approaching him at the cash. He related the stories to Patrick, listing the details that led him to a diagnosis as the person spoke to him from across the counter or beside the canned vegetables. He was proud, Patrick could tell, but it wasn't pride as simple boastfulness at having made a diagnosis (without any diagnostic equipment or tests), but rather something that seemed at first to be
selfless: a pride in being part of people's lives, a pride in his ability to help.

The streets were movie-set empty, not even a stray Den Haagenar to add some colour as an extra. Patrick checked his watch: he was late, but there wasn't a cab in sight and to jog would be to pull the pin on what he knew would be a grenade of a headache. An empty tram glided down Johan de Wittlaan, and he thought of Birgita again, wondering how she had got back home. He thought she'd stay the night, not because he'd had any expectations of her, but because she'd fallen asleep. He'd got up in the dark to use the washroom and found her still there, sleeping beside him. He tried not to wake her. He remembered stepping over her bra on the floor, his foot brushing against the underwire. She was sleeping, breathing shallowly. He got under the covers and felt her shiver as he moved close to her. He thought she'd be there in the morning and couldn't imagine her getting up in the middle of the night to leave.

Another tram passed in the opposite direction, bound for the city centre with four or five passengers aboard. All staring straight ahead.

In reacquainting himself with the Garcías, Patrick had begun to understand the scope of Hernan's practice, how it extended beyond the aisles of the store. There had been times in those years when Patrick was at the Garcías' and someone would knock on the door, asking for Hernan by name or just requesting to see “
el doctor
.” Patrick would invariably be studying, books splayed out over the kitchen table, and he fixed his eyes on whatever page of the textbook he was reading as he tried to follow what was going on down the hallway. Then Hernan would lead them–a man or a couple,
sometimes an entire family–to one of the back bedrooms and the door would close and stay shut for twenty minutes. Any other García in the house would carry on as though nothing unusual was happening, not even pausing to acknowledge the family of four traipsing through their kitchen as the visitors were led out.

And although he admired Hernan, he also had begun to feel a growing uneasiness that his mentor was acting as a doctor to these people. This was benevolence, Patrick tried to remind himself as another frightened man was ushered into a back room for a quick exam.
These people have nothing.
Hernan was the only one who cared. This was heroic, this was the righteousness that Hernan had expressed to him, the sentiment that helped Patrick through that first year of medical school. And yet, it was wrong, so clearly wrong, even to a student like Patrick.

In hindsight, Patrick's concern was understandable. With each year Patrick gained confidence in his own skills and judgment, and as he began to work with other doctors, Hernan's actions seemed increasingly questionable. Irresponsible. The argument was still there–these people needed help, but why hadn't Hernan just recertified as a doctor? It would have taken years, and even if he passed all the exams and qualified, the government would likely have assigned him to a rural practice. But still, he would have been able to help more fully, more honestly than a man practising out of a back room. Of course, he hadn't known then the reasons for Hernan's secrecy, that for Hernan, the back room was the safest place, the only place.

As terrible as all the accusations of Lepaterique were, Patrick was just as troubled by the secret practice that had taken place
all those years ago in the Garcías' duplex on Harvard Street. Why had he been allowed in on that secret? What had Hernan really wanted him to see? A man doing good? A man, though he couldn't have known it, trying to make amends? Patrick, in fact, came to see Hernan not just as a person with formidable skills or heroic intentions, but as a man capable of disregarding the law and, more ominously, as someone whose life as a doctor seemed centred on need, a need as much his as his patients'. Was it a test of Patrick's loyalty? Did he think Patrick would understand?

Despite his misgivings, Patrick had never told Hernan to stop. Never warned him it was wrong and dangerous. He said nothing and Hernan trusted him. Now, all Patrick felt was anger that Hernan had not shielded him from this secret life. A friend, a true colleague, would have spared a novice. But Patrick had not been spared, and in this, Hernan had made him complicit. In a way, Hernan had already tried to make Patrick choose sides.

He walked down Johan de Wittlaan, cool in the mid-morning hotel-fed shadows. He was late and had made a mistake not taking a cab, but he continued with a pace unchanged until he reached Geestbrugweg. There, on the corner, he lifted his hand to shield his face, caught in a rare half-block of sunlight.

 

SIXTEEN

No one should care that he loved Celia García.

But Elyse cared. He and Celia were together for three years–thirty-eight and one-half months–duly noted by Elyse in her book. Of course, Elyse was most interested in the moment the relationship began–an event rich with inferences to Fernandez and the invisible hand of Hernan guiding the star-crossed lovers, etc. She spent a scant paragraph noting the relationship's fractious conclusion, alluding to the fact that by this time Hernan and Patrick had both “got” what they wanted from each other, and, with surrogacy no longer necessary for either man, the otherwise baseless relationship between Celia and Patrick naturally dissolved. The time in between seemed not to interest Elyse, it being happy and human and lacking the various dramatic or symbolic elements that would otherwise make it worth mentioning in her book.

But he and Celia were happy, at least at the beginning. It wasn't a lie. It was simple, ordinary love. He told himself this repeatedly, almost as if to rebut the continuous, forensic
re-examination of their time together that Elyse's book had forced him into, the search for deeper reasons for why two people would willingly share the same space for any period of time. They loved each other; it was a thought that fortified him, a chance occurrence and an assertion of mutual free will in the face of Elyse's theories. No, Hernan had nothing to do with that, nothing to do with them.

The year after his father died, Patrick moved out of his mother's house to a place of his own a couple of blocks from the hospital in the student ghetto–it was Montreal in the depths of a recession. The city had emptied out like a pool after Labour Day and apartments were cheap and available. He found an apartment on the top floor of a greystone that gave evidence of having previously been a single, larger residence gyprocked into smaller rental units, each an illogical warren of rooms. All the furniture he owned filled fewer than half of the rooms, and that's when he had the idea of offering one of them to Celia for studio space.

It made sense. No canvases stacked in her room at home, no Nina coughing away, no need to rent space on some dark street on the Plateau. Not living together, just sharing space. It was his apartment, they both made that clear, but, if she had to stay over, well, that was the artist's prerogative. Again, no objection from Hernan. In the fifteen years that followed, he'd lived through his share of address changes, a succession of place-names where his mail arrived. A new locale every few years, each one convenient, provisional. But Lorne Avenue was different. He had three years there, below Elyse Brenman's radar, finding another place, besides the Garcías' house and Le Dépanneur Mondial, where he experienced moments of perfect happiness.

He could remember no dinner parties with friends, no landlord knocking on the door with the inevitable demand to turn the music down. Celia needed the same things he did–for the apartment to be quiet–and they both found the silence an unexpected bounty. There were days, with both of them working in the apartment, when they wouldn't say a word to each other for hours. A solitude without loneliness, a solitude that came to an end every evening. Was that it? Was love just another word for the rare mixture of compatibility and sex and convenience that seemed effortless? A summer camp sort of commitment, a camaraderie of similar needs and circumstance.

No, he believed it was more than that. She confided in him, telling him how she worried about her mother's moodiness or Roberto's constant fights with her father. He knew how angry she became when people made assumptions about her, how they expected the
Latina
to be fiery and volatile and how they overlooked the precision and effort in her work. No, he knew Celia. There was the smell of her when she would crawl into bed after a night of painting. She would wash but she could never get free of the scent. He would kiss her and the taste stung of solvent, the smell of pigment always there in the dark. Celia was a ritual he observed, never imagining it could be routine, never thinking it could require effort.

As much as any allegiance to Hernan, he understood it was his time with Celia that had brought him to Den Haag. But, by the time he arrived at the
pension
, Patrick was feeling a pincer grasp of panic about having to face her. He hoped she wouldn't come, but he'd presented the invitation in such a way that made it seem like a dare. She'd be coming, he knew it, if only to prove a point. He then had the sudden realization that a day at the beach with Celia was the single most ill-advised idea he'd
ever come up with. Their life together was nostalgia. Now he was an imposition. He was not a solace to her, he was not a friend, he was a means to freeing her father. And he was failing at that.

A day with the Garcías, away from the distractions of the tribunal, able to channel their anger–on, say, him–was a depressing thought. And while he had been, up to that point, able to suppress any feelings of guilt about what had happened the night before, he was certain if Celia came she would be able to smell Birgita on him, that scent of betrayal particularly familiar to her.
The beach.
What was he thinking? It made him want to turn around and run back to the Metropole. Everyone was unhappy and at each other's throats and now they were all going to the beach.
Fucking. Brilliant
. Windburn and jellyfish and riptides would be the best they could hope for. At least some terrors promised silence.

When he turned the corner onto Geestbrugweg, Patrick found the García sisters already waiting on the sidewalk in front of their guest
pension
. Paul sat in a stroller, one of those technologically advanced models with metal finishes and big wheels, the type of vehicle he imagined capable, with minimal modification, of sending back images to
NASA
from the surface of Mars. He never thought he would see Celia push such a contraption. From behind the stroller, Celia watched him. She looked different, relaxed, actually smiling as he neared. He was a weak man, he thought, needing to remind himself of the things she'd said the night before in order not to think that this smile meant détente.